LOS CERROS DE SAN JUAN” WINE CELLAR IS NATIONAL HERITAGE OF URUGUAY The First article of the International Letter about the monument conservation and restoration, agreed in Venice in 1964, says: The notion of monument covers the isolated architectural creation as well as the urban or rural site, which offers us a particular civilization testimony, of a representative phase of the evolution or progress, or of an historical event. It refers, not only to great creations but equally to modest works that with time have acquired a cultural meaning. No one who knows “Los Cerros de San Juan” Wine Cellar can escape that she perfectly fits with the aforementioned monument definition. That is why it is a good sense and a justice act the declaration of National Heritage awarded by the Commission of the National Cultural Heritage.
HISTORY THAT COMES FROM FAR
From one hundred and fifty years, anniversary celebrated last year, “Los Cerros de San Juan” is indissolublely linked to the historic evolution in Uruguay. The work of the Lahusen founders, German businessmen who around the middle of the nineteenth century discovered the potentiality of a naturally privileged place, was generous and it marked milestones in the development of the modern Uruguay. The determination of those pioneers is a sang of the labor of men working in communion with the land. With the Creole families support settled in the place and the contribution of European qualified immigrants (mostly Germans, Italians, French and Irish) “Los Cerros de San Juan” with time has transformed in a productive complex that took in livestock farming, agriculture, wine production, agro industries, extractive industries, that from those piers sand and stone, coal and wood could be exported.
To have an approximate idea of what “Los Cerros de San Juan” meant in the development of the country, please have in mind that between 1891 and the first decade of the twentieth century there were built 120 buildings, to house among 900 and 1,000 constant inhabitants, to build warehouses, stores, 2 schools, bureaus, and other premises. By then, the establishment was better communicated by fluvial-maritime via than by land. The ships that carried out the journey of the interior rivers and of Del Plata, docked in the early constructed piers, ensuring the communications between Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Most of these ships were property of the company. The historian Alcides Beretta Curi has exhumed an article, published in “Rural Industries” in 1930, where “Los Cerros de San Juan” is described as “a great and enormous extension farm, in which several lines of the agriculture and cattle raising production are intensively exploited”. According with the author of the note, it was then “a model establishment within the “Rio de la Plata” area, having no similar in the European countries or in North America, in which companies of analog structure couldn’t exist, that are no viable out of the natural conditions that Uruguay and Argentina offer for livestock farming”. The statements of those times, are today verified in emblematic constructions admired by visitors, as the “Stone Wine Cellar”, the habitable nucleus known as “Wine Cellar Town” and “Vineyard Town”, the old Bakery and Warehouse built in stone, the ex-Hotel, nowadays a social club and school, work of a German architect Carlos Nordmann, and the guest house, with an open sole, U shape, with a courtyard that faces north and linked to the vineyard. As Angelica Vitale Parra well said: “In San Juan, memories are there, to whom know how to find them”.
A WINE CELLAR WITH A GOBLIN
It is known that the elderly constructions host mysteries among its walls, its corners animate the imagination of the visitors, and the invisible to the eye gets tangible because of the sensitivity of who step over footprints that other feet marked, during generations, before us. The Stone Wine Cellar is not an exception, and there, to who are capable of sensing its invisible presence, it lives an elf, a guard of thousands of wine bottles that sleep its aging dream, and quiet guide of the visitors who go round it. The Stone Wine Cellar, with two floors and walls of seventy centimeters thick was excavated in the nineteenth century in the hard rock of a hill. Noisy labor of stonemasons working at the sun to create a silent and in semi-darkness sanctuary, cradle of barrels and bottles that contain the magic of “Los Cerros de San Juan” wines. The visitor can find there since the first oak barrels from Germany, to the most modern French elaboration, passing through the time production of the Uruguayan Barrel Store of Adolfo Simon, with its factory in Montevideo. The Stone Wine Cellar contains a well-known worldwide treasure, by the specialists in the viticulture industry, a National Heritage that lies in the second floor of the wine cellar: an original cooling system dated in 1860.
The oral tradition tells that the German immigrants dig an underground chamber beneath the wine cellar, which was filled with rain water in winter, where bronze pipes circulated in it. In those pipes passed the wine in the grape harvest time, to achieve the necessary cooling, typical from the German technology. When the grape harvest was finished, the water had given the wine its freshness, and it turned mild, and it was then taken out of the chamber, which would fill again the next winter. Because there were no electric pumps, the workers made the wine circulation by a pump boosted by their own strength, generated by pedaling in a sort of permanent bicycle. Nowadays the visitor can go down to the original chamber, and see in the bottom the old bronze pipes that were part of the cooling system. More information in spanish: Los Cerros de San Juan, 150 Años de historia Uruguaya; Ediciones Trilce, ISBN 9974-32-379-7 |
